Seth Baum
American researcher

Seth Baum is an American researcher involved in the field of risk research. He is the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), a think tank focused on existential risk. He is also affiliated with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and the Columbia University Center for Research on Environmental Decisions.
Academic career
Baum obtained his BS in optics and mathematics in 2003 at the University of Rochester, followed by an MS in Electrical Engineering, Northeastern University in 2006.
In 2012, he obtained his PhD in Geography with his dissertation on climate change policy: "Discounting Across Space and Time in Climate Change Assessment" from Pennsylvania State University. Later, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the Columbia University Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. Baum then steered his research interests into astrophysics and global risks, including global warming and nuclear war, and the development of effective solutions for reducing them.
Furthermore, he is a Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis.
Work
As a graduate student in Northstrom, Boston, Baum contributed to the Whats Up magazine (now Spare Change News), from 2004 to 2007.
In 2011, Baum co-founded GCRI along with Tony Barrett, with the mission to "develop the best ways to confront humanity's gravest threats".
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This entry incorporates text from “Seth Baum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.